Artforum International

An international contemporary art magazine covering sculpture, painting, mixed media, and installation works, as well as architecture, music, and popular culture. Includes artist interviews and reviews of individual artists and/or galleries; reviews of fi

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Articles from Vol. 36, No. 2, October

A dead woman's body on the seashore, draped in a bright-green blanket; her bare legs and the bottoms of her feet pointing at the viewer, the rest hidden. Not far from the corpse sits a large German shepherd, a mute witness, staring at someone or something...

My first exposure to Jack Smith was Flaming Creatures, which I remember seeing more than a dozen times in a row. It was an overwhelming experience, one of unfathomable mystery and emotionally delirious "otherness." Opening one's eyes to its faded, "pasty,"...

When Boris Groys decided at the beginning of the '80s to emigrate from the former Soviet Union to Germany, he was considered a suspicious character in his old home and an unknown in his new. Today, fifteen years later, he is still considered a suspicious...

There was a short time, late in 1963, when audiences for avant-garde cinema in New York could witness two intersecting entourages converging upon film screenings. The one group, Jack Smith and his "creatures," was breaking up just as the other, Andy...

Helen Levitt may well be the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time. Even though she had her first solo show at MOMA before she turned thirty, and is now, at age eighty-four, widely recognized as a modern master, much of the current...

On the 24th of this month, Matthew Barney's Cremaster 5, the concluding segment of the artist's five-film-cycle-in-progress (episodes 1 and 3 are still to come), opens at New York's Film Forum. Contributing editor David Frankel takes a crack at Barney's...

Between opening the Hyperbole Photography Studio in an East Village storefront around 1957 and his return to black and white images around 1961, the legendary film-maker and performer Jack Smith produced an extraordinary body of color photography (the...

The multiculturalism debate no longer dominates art-world conversations the way it once did. But the conditions that informed it are part of today's weather, and if we don't talk about them, well, we don't talk about global warming either, not at least...

4TH BIENNALE D'ART CONTEMPORAIN DE LYON Putting together a big international survey is not only a matter of knowing which works to include; it also means selecting and presenting pieces in a given space so that they work together and the show functions...

Organized to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the nearby Rothko chapel, "Mark Rothko: The Chapel Commission" provided, more than its title might suggest, a compelling if not fully comprehensive overview of the second half of Rothko's mature...

Jack Smith always wanted to be a fashion photographer. None of his fashion photos have surfaced. Of course his best stills are like fashion shots - but fashion shots from another civilization. It's not as though Jack failed at becoming a fashion photographer...

Still life. The very term brings a furtive tear to the eye - a tear of nostalgia, perhaps, for all that has disappeared from contemporary art in the way of illusionism, pleasure, and painterly virtuosity. Or perhaps it is the melancholy evoked by the...

The academic enterprise that goes by the name of cultural studies is by now a global phenomenon. Its fortunes indeed have paralleled the transnational expansion of the entertainment industries from which its exponents draw so much of their material for...

Martin Kippenberger's magic always cast a powerful spell over his audience, sometimes literally putting them under the influence. Not so long ago I invited him to visit the Yale School of Art, and with extravagant melodrama he struggled through the early-morning...

It was the end of a long summer afternoon in the early '60s and I was sitting with Jack Smith in his loft on Grand Street. That is, I was sitting, he was lying on the floor, limp as an abandoned marionette, looking as mournful as only Jack could when...

JARVIS ROCKWELL IN HIS STUDIO Jarvis Rockwell's toy collection is housed in a suite of offices on the corner of Main and Railroad in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. This is Norman Rockwell country, and Jarvis is Norman's eldest son. I first saw the...

Willful obscurantism, the elevation of the banal, and the ironic appreciation of trash culture are guiding principles of most 'zines. 'Zine pioneer Candi Strecker, ruminating on her own fascination with beer-can hats, eloquently identified this tendency...